Fans have been waiting for new Jimmy Page music since 1998's Walking Into Clarksdale collaboration with Robert Plant. During a new chat with Classic Rock magazine, the Led Zeppelin co-founder was pressed about what he's been doing creatively since lockdown began. Page said, “Archiving, working on various paths and routes of projects, but I’m not going to say what the projects are. There’s various things I’m working towards. It’s not just one thing, it’s multiple things, and I don’t want to even give a hint, because if. . . you give a one-sentence sound bite, and then if it doesn’t materialize it’s like: 'Why didn’t you do a solo album?' So I don’t want to say what it is that I’ve got planned, because I don’t want to give people the chance to misinterpret it.”
Page remained cryptic as he went on to say, “I really can’t put on record what the new record is. I’ll leave it to your imagination. The thing is there are so many ways I could present myself. . . within a space of time (laughs). I’ve come across all these various projects I did. And one of the things I did recently is listen to a recording I made of the Marrakesh Folk Festival, with the tribes coming in from all over Morocco, in 1975. It’s fascinating. Tribal stuff passed on from father to son and kept alive because of the folk festivals, Essaouira, and all the rest. Where there are people who want to hear the Berbers. I certainly do, it’s good for the soul.”
Jimmy Page recently explained the benefits of making music in collaboration: “The fact of playing with other, y'know, personalities — musically, so, to speak — can be an inspiration and you take it in an organic sense, the same way that we got here at this point. Y'know, working with the Egyptians, the Moroccans, and y'know, the Celtic areas. I mean, you can be inspired my working with these people; and that's basically what it is. If you get in a room and there's a particular, sort of, identity of sound coming from somewhere, and you can get inspired by it, and who knows what comes next? But up till this point, it's been pretty good.” SOUNDCDUE